I have gotten a lot better at D3.js development over the past few years, and can trace most of my improvement to coming across a few key tutorials, blogs, books and other resources on the topic. They’ve been a huge help for me, and I’ve gathered a bunch of my favorites in this post to hopefully help others improve their D3 experience.

Sumnotes is the only simple, yet robust solution to scrape PDF books, lecture notes or research papers, helping you to focus on what matters to you. […] No installation, no adding bloat to your computer, everything you need is the internet connection and a web browser. […] Extracted annotations can be easily exported in to the DOC and TXT formats [and to Evernote!].

I really don’t understand why most people in the Humanities insist on using Microsoft Word to write their material. Universities habituate their undergraduate humanities students to Word and they really ought to stop it. I recently got a shock to my anti-Word stance when I wrote an article and was looking to submit it to a journal that only takes MS Word format articles. The journal also had a really nasty custom citation format, which complicated it even further.

My bf introduced me to markdown, and I saw that others had used it for theirthesisorpapers, and that it was possible to add citations and everything else academics needed, with the help of pandoc. It basically uses the power of LaTex to create your document, but you get to concentrate on writing, in a simple text editor. It looked clean and tidy, and appealed to the procrastinating, typography-loving, tools-and-gadgets geek in me. Or maybe I’m just an academic hipster.

As a newly-minted PhD student, I was talking with a friend about writing papers. “Use LaTeX”, he said. I thought he meant the rubbery material commonly found in lab gloves. But apparently not. LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is typesetting software that he used for writing papers.

Start a blog. Why? Because academic blogging is an accessible platform for communicating your passion with the world. A blog facilitates instant publishing with the largest potential audience of any medium in the world. Not to mention it’s cheaper than a coffee habit.

The point of this is to enable those of us who work on multiple PC’s to avoid lots of extra syncing and keep our file links intact. Mendeley does a great job of syncing references and maintaining links – IFF you let it host the files. If you do not, then it just syncs references and you have to manually relink at each new computer.